Episode 363: The Dodo and Friends

Thanks to Wilmer and Carson for suggesting we revisit the dodo!

Further reading:

Dodos and spotted green pigeons are descendants of an island-hopping bird

On the possible vernacular name and origin of the extinct Spotted Green Pigeon Caloenus maculata

Giant, fruit-gulping pigeon eaten into extinction on Pacific islands

A taxidermied dodo:

The Nicobar pigeon, happily still alive [photo by Devin Morris – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110541928]:

The 1823 illustration of the spotted green pigeon:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to revisit a bird that everyone’s heard of but no one has seen alive, because it’s famously extinct. We talked about the dodo way back in episode 19, so it’s definitely time we talked about it again. Thanks to Wilmer and Carson for suggesting it! We’re also going to learn about some of the close relations of the dodo.

The first report of a dodo was in 1598 by Dutch sailors who stopped by the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Mauritius is east of Madagascar, which is off the eastern coast of Africa. The last known sighting of a dodo was in 1662, just 64 years later. The dodo went extinct so quickly, and was so little known, that for a couple of centuries afterwards many people assumed it was just a sailor’s story. But there were remains of dodos, and in the 19th century scientists gathered up everything they could find to study the birds. More remains were found on Mauritius.

In the wild, the dodo was a sleek bird that could run quite fast. It may have eaten crabs and other small animals as well as roots, nuts, seeds, and fruit. It was also probably pretty smart. People only thought it was dumb because it didn’t run away from sailors—but it had no predators on Mauritius so never had to worry about anything more dangerous than an occasional egg-stealing crab before.

When humans arrived on Mauritius, they killed and ate dodos and their eggs. What the sailors didn’t eat, the animals they brought with them did, like pigs and rats. It was a stark and clear picture of human-caused extinction, shocking to the Victorian naturalists who studied it.

A lot of the drawings and paintings we have of dodos were made from badly taxidermied birds or from overfed captive birds. At least eleven live dodos were brought to Europe and Asia, some bound for menageries, some intended as pets. The last known captive dodo was sent to Japan in 1647.

The dodo grew over three feet tall, or almost a meter, with brown or gray feathers, a floofy tuft of gray feathers as a tail, big yellow feet, and a weird head. The feathers stopped around the forehead, making it look sort of like it was wearing a hood. Its face was bare and the bill was large, bulbous at the end with a hook, and was black, yellow, and green. The dodo looks, in fact, a lot like what you might expect pigeons to evolve into if pigeons lived on an island with no predators, and that’s exactly what happened.

The dodo’s closest living relation is the Nicobar pigeon, which can grow 16 inches long, or over 40 cm. Like other pigeons, the dodo’s feathers probably had at least some iridescence, but the Nicobar pigeon is extra colorful. Its head is gray with long feathers around its shoulders like a fancy collar, and the rest of its body is metallic blue, green, and bronze with a short white tail. Zoos love to have these pigeons on display because they’re so pretty. It’s a protected animal, but unfortunately it’s still captured for sale on the pet black market or just hunted for food. It only lays one egg a year so it doesn’t reproduce very quickly, and all this combined with habitat loss make it an increasingly threatened bird. Scientists are trying to learn more about it so it can be better protected.

The Nicobar pigeon lives on a number of islands in the South Pacific and it can fly. Sometimes an errant individual is discovered in Australia, often after storms. Imagine going into your back yard one day and seeing a 40-centimeter-long bird whose feathers shine like jewels! The Nicobar pigeon lives in small flocks and eats seeds, fruit, and other plant material.

An even closer relative to the dodo is also the most mysterious. We don’t even know for sure if it’s extinct, although that’s very likely. It’s the spotted green pigeon and we only have one specimen–and we don’t even know where it was collected, just that it was an island somewhere in the South Pacific. There used to be two specimens, but no one knows what happened to the second one.

For a long time researchers weren’t even sure the spotted green pigeon was a distinct species or just a Nicobar pigeon with weird-colored feathers, but in 2014, DNA testing on two of the remaining specimen’s feathers showed it was indeed a separate species. Researchers think the spotted green pigeon, the dodo, and another extinct bird, the Rodrigues solitaire, all descended from an unknown pigeon ancestor that liked to island hop. Sometimes some of those pigeons would decide they liked a particular island and would stay, ultimately evolving into birds more suited to the habitat.

The specimen we have of the spotted green pigeon is 13 inches long, or 32 cm. Its feathers are dark brown with green iridescence and it has long neck feathers like the Nicobar pigeon. It also has little yellowish spots on its wings and a yellow tip to its bill. Researchers think it was probably a fruit-eating bird that lived in treetops.

The only reason we know there were once two specimens of this mystery bird is from a book about birds published in 1783, where the author mentions having seen two specimens. There was also an 1823 book about birds with an illustration of the spotted green pigeon that differs from the known specimen in some details. Researchers think the illustration might have been painted from the now-missing specimen.

There’s more to this mystery, though, because in 2020 an ornithologist studied a 1928 book about Tahiti that mentioned a bird that sounds a lot like the spotted green pigeon. It was even called a pigeon in the book. Since the author of that book had drawn on studies made by her grandfather almost a hundred years before, and since her grandfather had interviewed Tahitians about their history and traditions and they told him about the pigeon, the ornithologist suggested the spotted green pigeon might actually be from Tahiti. Now that scientists have a clue about where to start looking for remains of the bird, we might learn more about it soon.

Also in 2020, a study was published about another pigeon from the Pacific Islands. Fossils of it were found on the island of Tonga, and the scientists determined that the bird probably went extinct soon after humans first arrived on the island 2,850 years ago. The pigeon has been named Tongoenas burleyi. It grew about 20 inches long, or 50 cm, not counting its tail. It could fly and probably spent a lot of its time in trees, eating fruit. There are lots of different trees on the island that produce really big fruit, some of it as big as a tennis ball. Scientists think the pigeon was adapted to swallow these huge fruits whole, digest them, and poop out the seeds. The trees still exist but they’re in decline and scientists think it may be because no birds remain on the island that can spread their seeds effectively.

We don’t have any feathers from the newly described pigeon, but it was probably colorful. We do have a lot of bones, because many charred bones have been discovered in cooking pits excavated by archaeologists.

We don’t know yet how or if Tongoenas is related to the dodo. The Pacific islands are home to at least 90 living species of pigeon, and many of them we don’t know much about. There are undoubtedly many more waiting to be discovered by scientists, whether living or extinct.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 362: The Sawfish and the Sawshark

Thanks to Murilo for suggesting this week’s episode about the sawfish and the sawshark!

Further Reading:

Sawfish or sawshark?

Two New Species of Sixgill Sawsharks Discovered

Do not step:

The underside of a largetooth sawfish [photo by J. Patrick Fischer – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17421638]:

The sawshark has big eyes [photo by OpenCago.info – Wikimedia Commons [1], CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25240095]:

A comparison of rostrums. The sawskate is in the middle, the one with barbels is the sawshark, and the really toothy one is the sawfish [picture by Daeng Dino – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=137983599]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to learn about an amazing fish suggested by Murilo. It’s the sawfish, and while we’re at it, we’re also going to learn about a different fish called the sawshark.

There are five species of sawfish alive today in two genera, and they’re all big. The smallest species can still grow over 10 feet long, or 3 meters, while the biggest species can grow over 20 feet long, or 6 meters. The largest sawfish ever reliably measured was 24 feet long, or 7.3 meters. Since all species of sawfish are endangered due to overfishing, pollution, and habitat loss, really big individuals are much rarer these days.

The sawfish lives mostly in warm, shallow ocean waters, usually where the bottom is muddy or sandy. It can also tolerate brackish and even freshwater, and will sometimes swim into rivers and live there just fine. The largetooth sawfish is especially happy in freshwater.

Let’s talk specifically about the largetooth sawfish for a moment, since we know the most about it. Like other sawfish, the female gives birth to live young, up to 13 babies at a time, and the babies can be up to three feet long at birth, or 90 cm. When a baby is born, its saw, which we’ll talk about in a minute, is covered with a jelly-like sheath that keeps it from hurting its mother. The sheath dissolves soon after birth.

The mother usually gives birth around the mouth of a river, and instead of swimming into the ocean, the babies swim upstream into the river. They live there for the next several years, and some individuals and even some populations may live their whole lives in the river. It’s sometimes called the river sawfish or the freshwater sawfish for this reason.

One interesting thing about the largetooth sawfish is how agile it is. All sawfish are good swimmers, but the largetooth sawfish is especially good. It can swim backwards, it can jump more than twice its own length out of the water, and it can climb over rocks and other obstacles using its fins, even if the obstacle isn’t completely submerged. It’s possible that other species of sawfish can do the same, but scientists just haven’t observed this behavior yet. We actually don’t know that much about most species of sawfish because of how rare they’ve become.

The sawfish is a type of ray, and rays are most closely related to sharks. Like sharks, rays have an internal skeleton made of cartilage instead of bone, but they also have bony teeth. You can definitely see the similarity between sharks and sawfish in the body shape although the sawfish is flattened underneath, which allows it to lie on the ocean floor. There’s also another detail that helps you tell a sawfish from a shark: the rostrum, or snout. It’s surprisingly long and studded with teeth on both sides, which makes it look like a saw.

The teeth on the sawfish’s saw are actual teeth. They’re called rostral teeth and the rostrum itself is part of the skull, not a beak or a mouth. It’s covered in skin just like the rest of the body. The sawfish’s mouth is located underneath the body quite a bit back from the rostrum’s base, and the mouth contains a lot of ordinary teeth that aren’t very sharp.

So, you may be asking, if the sawfish has plenty of teeth in its mouth, how and why does it also have those extra teeth on both sides of its saw? It’s because the rostral teeth evolved from dermal denticles. We’ve talked about dermal denticles a few times before, but a few months ago we had a Patreon bonus episode that went into more detail. In that episode, I talked about an article about a type of catfish, so let me just quote the whole section of that episode. It’s not long and I think it’s really interesting. Heck, I’ll just drop the audio in directly from that Patreon episode:

Our next article is from October 2017 and is intriguingly titled “When teeth grow on the body.” It sounds horrific, but it’s actually a study of certain catfish that grow bony plates with tiny teeth on their bodies as defense.

Catfish don’t have scales, but some species of denticulate catfish that live in South America grow bony plates that act like armor. Many of these plates are covered in thin little teeth–actual teeth, including enamel and dentin, with pulp inside. They’re called extra-oral teeth, dermal denticles, or odontodes, and the study determined that they appeared about 120 million years ago in ancient catfish that hadn’t yet evolved the bony plates. The teeth regrow when they’re lost, and in some species, males grow larger teeth than females and use them to fight other males. Imagine biting someone without needing to open your mouth.

Anyway, dermal denticles aren’t all that rare in fish. Sharks and rays are both covered with them. They’re also called placoid scales but they’re literally teeth, they’re just not used for eating. In the case of the sawfish, the rostral teeth grow much larger than an ordinary dermal denticle, and stick out sideways like the teeth of a saw. Different species have differently shaped rostral teeth. The teeth grow throughout the sawfish’s life, but unlike the teeth in the mouth, if the sawfish loses a rostral tooth, it doesn’t grow back. If it chips the top off a rostral tooth, though, that part will grow back.

The sawfish uses its rostrum to find the fish, crustaceans, and mollusks it eats. Both the rostrum and the head are packed with electroreceptors that allow the sawfish to sense tiny electrical charges that animals emit as they move. This might mean a school of fish swimming through muddy water, or it might mean a crustacean hiding in the sand. The sawfish sometimes uses its rostrum to dig prey out of the sand, but it also uses it to slash at fish or other animals. Then the sawfish can either grab the injured or dead animal with its mouth or pin it to the sea floor with its rostrum to maneuver it into its mouth. Its mouth is relatively small and it prefers to swallow its food whole, head-first, so it can only eat fish that are smaller than its mouth.

This means the sawfish leaves humans alone, because we’re way too big to fit into its mouth. It doesn’t want anything to do with us. Unfortunately, people keep bothering the sawfish, either by catching it illegally, leaving fishing nets and other trash in the ocean that sawfish and lots of other animals get tangled in, or by destroying its habitat with destructive dredging or trawling. The largetooth sawfish used to live around southern North America, but it relied on mangrove swamps to act as a nursery for baby sawfish. So many of the mangrove swamps have been destroyed so that people can build fancy hotels and shopping centers that the largetooth sawfish hasn’t been seen around North America in over 50 years, although the smalltooth sawfish is still hanging on.

Sawfish do well in captivity but require gigantic tanks, and even when given the best of care, they almost never breed in captivity. They live a long time, though, sometimes for decades.

Luckily for the sawfish, the female can reproduce without a male if she can’t find a mate. Instead of her eggs being fertilized by the male’s sperm, sometimes a female’s eggs will just develop into her genetic clones. Conservationists are working to make sure the sawfish and its habitat are protected so the babies can grow up safe and healthy.

We can’t talk about the sawfish without mentioning the sawshark. It’s a shark, not a ray, but it looks a whole lot like a sawfish–so much so that in places where both animals live, such as around Australia, people have a hard time telling them apart.

The sawshark mostly lives in much deeper water than the sawfish and is much smaller on average, about five feet long, or 1.5 meters. It has a pair of barbels about halfway down its saw that help it find food when there’s not much light to see by. Another major difference is that its gill slits are on the sides of its neck instead of under its body. It eats fish, squid, and crustaceans.

The sawshark’s rostrum also contains electroreceptors, although we don’t know for sure that it uses its saw the same way as the sawfish does. We actually don’t know very much about the sawshark, not even how many species are alive today. A new species was described in 2013 and two new species were described in 2020. There are probably more that are completely unknown to science, and maybe completely unknown to people in general.

Finally, there’s another fish that looks like a sawfish or sawshark, the sawskate, but its entire suborder, Sclerorhynchoidei, is completely extinct. It disappears from the fossil record 66 million years ago. I feel like I need a sound effect to play every time I mention that an animal went extinct 66 million years ago, to remind listeners that that’s the date of the extinction event that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs and many other animals. Maybe something like this. What do you think?

[comet sound]

Anyway, scientists are pretty sure the sawskate wasn’t very closely related to sawfish or sawsharks, but was more closely related to modern skates. Skates look a lot like rays but belong to a different family. Modern skates don’t have much of a rostrum at all, but the sawskate had a long tapering rostrum and some species had rostral teeth. Most species of sawskate were fairly small, but at least one grew an estimated 6 feet long, or about 2 meters.

If you’ve been thinking that a rostrum with teeth on both sides sounds like the kind of sword that old-timey warriors would use, you’re actually right. Traditionally, people in parts of the world where sawfish are common would sometimes use a big dried rostrum as a weapon.

These days, of course, sawfish are protected species. That means you can’t have a sawfish rostrum sword, sorry. Let the sawfish keep its sword.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 361: The New Hominin

Welcome to 2024! Let’s learn about some exciting new discoveries in our own family tree!

Further reading:

476,000-Year-Old Wooden Structure Unearthed in Zambia

Mysterious 300,000-year-old skull could be new species of human, researchers say

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

It’s time to start the new year off with an episode that has me really excited. I was initially going to include this in the updates episode that usually comes out around summertime, but I just can’t wait. In 2023, scientists discovered what they think might be a new lineage of extinct human ancestors!

We’ll come back to that in a moment, but first I want to highlight another amazing human-relateded discovery from 2023.

And just to let you know, I am going to be using the words “humans” and “people” and “hominins” more or less interchangeably. I try to make it clear when I’m talking about Homo sapiens versus other species of ancient hominin, but these are all our ancestors–in many cases our direct ancestors–so they’re all people as far as I’m concerned.

As you may know, especially if you’ve listened to previous episodes where we’ve discussed ancient human ancestors, the ancestors of all humans evolved in Africa. Specifically, we arose in the southern part of Africa, in areas that had once been dense forest but gradually changed to open woodland and savanna. Because there weren’t very many trees, our far-distant hominin ancestors, the australopiths, no longer needed to be able to climb trees as well as their ape cousins. Instead, they evolved an upright stance and long legs to see over tall grasses, and the stamina to run after the animals they hunted until the animal was exhausted and couldn’t run anymore. Once our ancestors were walking on two legs all the time, their hands were free to carry babies and food and anything else they wanted.

Being fully bipedal meant that women had a harder time giving birth, since the pelvis had to change position to allow them to walk and run, so babies started being born when they were smaller. This meant the babies needed a whole lot more care for a lot longer, which meant that family groups became even more important and complicated. One thing we’ve learned about sociability in animals is that it leads to increased intelligence, and that’s definitely what happened with our long-distant ancestors. As their brains got bigger, they became more creative. They made lots of different types of tools, especially weapons and items that helped them process food, but eventually they also made artwork, baskets, clothing, jewelry, and everything else they needed.

All this took a long time, naturally. We know Australopithecus used stone tools over three million years ago, but we don’t have evidence of human ancestors using fire until a little over 1.5 million years ago. Homo sapiens was once thought to have only evolved around 100,000 years ago, maybe less, but as scientists find more remains and are able to use more sophisticated techniques to study those remains, the date keeps getting pushed back. Currently we’re pretty certain that actual humans, if not the fully modern humans alive today, arose about 300,000 years ago and maybe even earlier. Homo sapiens evolved from Homo erectus, which arose about two million years ago and went extinct about 100,000 years ago. They were probably the first hominin to use fire, which allowed humans to start migrating longer distances into colder climates. They might also have communicated with language. Basically, Homo erectus was a lot like us but not quite us yet.

The modern-day country of Zambia is in the middle of south-central Africa, and naturally it’s been home to humans and our ancestors for as long as humans have existed. One especially important part of Zambia is also one of its most beautiful places, Kalambo Falls, which is really close to the equally important and beautiful country of Tanzania. Scientists have known that humans of one kind or another have lived around Kalambo Falls for at least 447,000 years, long before Homo sapiens actually evolved.

When a team of archaeologists excavated a sandbar near the falls in 2019, they were surprised to find wooden artifacts. Wood doesn’t usually preserve for very long and the site they were excavating was quite old. In addition to wooden tools, they found two logs that had been shaped and notched to allow them to fit together securely. The researchers thought the logs had once been part of a structure like a walkway that would keep people’s feet out of the mud and water, or possibly the floor of a wooden structure used to store food. It might even have been the floor of a little house.

Wood can be dated with simple tests to find out its age, but the test is only useful for trees that died within the last 50,000 years. Anything older than that is just, you know, older than 50,000 years. The tools and logs tested as older, which the scientists expected. Fortunately there are other ways to date older wood, but the results of those tests were surprising even to the scientists. The tools were at least 324,000 years old, possibly as much as 390,000 years old, but the logs were even older, about 476,000 years old.

Remember, Homo sapiens didn’t even evolve until about 300,000 years ago. That means humans didn’t make those tools or build anything with those shaped logs. Some other hominin did, although we’re not sure who. Even more exciting, close examination of the logs suggests that they may have been subjected to fire at some point. That might mean a natural fire or it might mean that the people who were building with the logs were also using fire as much as two million years before we thought people were using fire.

Obviously scientists are going to look carefully for more clues about who might have shaped these logs and when. Hopefully we’ll learn more soon.

Around the same time that scientists uncovered the wooden items in southern Africa, another discovery was made in 2019, this one in East China. A team found a jaw, skull, and leg bones of a hominin that didn’t match up to any known human ancestor. The bones were dated to 300,000 years ago, at the dawn of Homo sapiens. Other hominins had migrated to eastern Asia long before this, however, including populations of Homo erectus.

The newly discovered bones don’t belong to Homo erectus, though. They don’t belong to Homo sapiens either, or any other known hominin. They represent a completely new hominin, and at the moment scientists don’t know where exactly they fit in our own family tree.

The bones show traits found in modern humans, like a flat face, but lack other uniquely human traits, most notably a chin. Homo sapiens have chins, unlike every other hominin, and no one’s sure why. It might have something to do with speech or maybe early humans with chins were just considered more attractive, and now everyone has a chin.

The mystery hominin is still being studied, but preliminary findings indicate that we might have discovered the ancestor of a very close relation. The bones show some traits also found in Neandertals, our very closest evolutionary cousins, even though they’re extinct. There’s a possibility that this new hominin gave rise to another line of very close human relations, one we don’t have any fossils of yet.

I know there are a lot of excited scientists wanting to learn more about the hominin bones. Hopefully more bones will turn up soon so we can get a better idea of who this distant relative is. It’s a little too early to throw them a welcome home party, but maybe we can start planning it now.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 360: The Emu War

Apologies to patrons for redoing an old Patreon episode, but I have a cold and it’s the holidays.

The noble emu:

A baby emu (picture from this site, which has lots of good info about emus and lots more great pictures):

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

I had a different episode planned to finish off the year, but I had lots of stuff to do for the holidays so I put it off, and then I came down with a cold. It’s just a cold, at least, and it’s not too serious, but I decided to repurpose a Patreon episode from early 2020 instead of making a new episode, because I don’t feel good. Apologies to my patrons for getting a rerun, but I did give the episode a brush-up and re-recorded it.

Our topic this week is a bird from Australia, the emu, but mostly we’re going to learn about the emu war that happened in 1932.

The emu is a large, flightless bird almost as big as an ostrich, over 6 feet tall, or 2 meters. Like the ostrich, it can run really fast, over 30 miles per hour, or 50 km/hour. It’s only distantly related to the ostrich, though, and in fact it’s much more closely related to the tiny kiwi of New Zealand.

The emu has long legs and a long neck, soft feathers that are gray and brown, and three toes on each foot. It also has small vestigial wings that are only about eight inches long, or 20 cm. The body feathers make the emu look shaggy, but the head and the upper portion of the neck are less heavily feathered so that it sort of looks like it’s wearing a fancy coat with a high collar. It also looks like it has a poofy wedge of a downward-pointing tail, but it actually doesn’t have much of a tail at all. What looks like a tail is mostly part of the body. The emu’s skeleton is built for running, which includes a modified pelvis and leg bones for the attachment of strong leg muscles.

In winter, the female puffs out her feathers and struts around to attract a mate while making drumlike calls. Females sometimes fight each other by kicking, especially if a female approaches a male who already has a mate. The male builds a nest on the ground by placing dry grass, sticks, bark, and other plant materials on a flat, open area where he can see any predators that might approach.

The female lays up to 15 green eggs that are around five inches long, or 13 cm. The male broods the eggs for the next eight weeks and doesn’t eat during that entire time, and only drinks whatever dew he can gather from the plants around the nest without leaving the nest. A male can lose a third of his weight while brooding. Meanwhile, the female often leaves and finds another mate, sometimes laying several clutches of eggs during the nesting season.

When the babies hatch, the father takes care of them for the next six or seven months, at which point they’re fully grown. While he’s in charge, the father won’t let any other emus near the chicks, even their mother. He teaches them to find food and if the babies feel threatened, they’ll run underneath him to hide. Baby emus have gray and white longitudinal stripes and are super cute.

The emu eats plants and insects, and will sometimes travel long distances to find enough food and water. It can go a long time without eating and several days without drinking. It usually only drinks once a day but it will drink a whole lot of water during that one time.

Some populations of emu migrate to the coast after breeding season, where they can find more food and cooler weather. But in 1932 in western Australia, migrating emus didn’t find their usual food supplies. They found a whole lot of wheat fields cultivated by former soldiers, who had been given land after World War I. The Australian government had encouraged the soldiers to clear the land of native vegetation and grow lots of wheat, which they did. Then the emus showed up.

Naturally, without their usual food to eat, the emus sampled the wheat plants. And they found the plants yummy. Also, even though there was a drought that year, there was plenty of water for the wheat, which meant plenty of water for emus. So the emus showed up and showed up and showed up, an estimated 20,000 emus eating as much wheat as they could hold and crashing through fences to get to it.

The farmers sent a group to speak to the Minister of Defence to get help. The Minister of Defence sent a major with a small handful of soldiers to deal with the birds, with the soldiers armed with two lightweight machine guns.

On November 2, 1932, the men encountered their first emus. The birds were too far away to shoot so the men tried to herd them closer, but the emus scattered instead of staying in a group. Two days later, the men encountered approximately a thousand emus and lay in wait until the birds were close enough to shoot at–but the gun jammed and the birds scattered again. At this point the soldiers had killed maybe two dozen birds in all.

That was enough that the emus had figured out the men were a danger. The men reported that each group of birds now had a lookout. The rest of the flock would eat while the lookout kept watch. When the lookout spotted the men, it warned the others and all the emus would scatter.

The men even tried mounting a machine gun on a truck to run the emus down. But the ground was too bumpy to aim while the truck was moving, plus it couldn’t outrun the emus. On one occasion a dead emu got tangled in the steering equipment and the truck crashed into a fence, destroying both the truck and the fence.

On November 8, the men were withdrawn after having only killed around 200 emus, but they’d used a quarter of the ammunition they’d been allotted to do that. One politician suggested sarcastically that the soldiers deserved a medal for their part in the war, and another politician pointed out that the medal should properly go to the emus.

But the emus were still a problem, so after more entreaties from farmers, the same men and guns were sent back to try again. They kept at it for the next month or so and did manage to kill maybe a few thousand birds, but for every bird they killed, they shot ten bullets. Finally they were recalled for good. The government put a bounty on dead emus instead, and the farmers put up larger and stronger fences. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that the bounty was canceled and the emu protected. The current population is large and healthy.

There used to be several smaller subspecies of emu, but they went extinct basically as soon as Europeans showed up. We’re lucky that the mainland emu survived the war and the bounty hunting so that we can appreciate it today.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 359: The Antarctic Death Star(fish)!

Thanks to Morgan for suggesting this week’s topic, the Antarctic Death Star!

Further reading:

Giant Monster Starfish ALERT

Echinoderm Tube Feet Don’t Suck! They Stick!

Bodies of Starfish and Other Echinoderms Are Really Just Heads, New Research Suggests

The Antarctic death star [from first link listed above]:

The “beartrap” structures, magnified [from first link listed above]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

It’s been way too long since we talked about an invertebrate, so this week we’ll look at one suggested by Morgan, the Antarctic death star.

It has a lot of other names too, including the Antarctic sun starfish and the wolftrap or beartrap starfish. Its scientific name is Labidiaster annulatus. I’m going to call it the death star because I think that’s hilarious.

As you may have guessed from its common names, the Antarctic death star is a starfish that lives in cold ocean waters near the Antarctic, AKA the south pole. But its common names also hint at how it gets its food, and this would be a good time to take a moment and be glad you’re not a copepod that also lives in the Antarctic Ocean.

The death star is reddish-brown on its dorsal side, white underneath. It’s a large starfish, up to two feet across, or 60 cm, and it also has a lot of legs, more properly called rays—up to 50 of them. The rays are long, narrow, and very flexible, and the undersides have rows of little structures called tube feet. All echinoderms, including starfish, have these tube feet and they’re used for several purposes. One important purpose is helping the animal stick to a hard surface, which allows it to climb around more easily and right itself if it gets flipped over.

For over 150 years scientists thought the tube feet acted like little suction cups, but that didn’t explain how a starfish or other echinoderm could stick to porous surfaces. It wasn’t until 2012 that a study was published explaining how the tube feet actually work. The tube feet exude tiny amounts of a sticky chemical that acts like glue.

The death star’s body also has little spines and bumps all over it, but it also has some structures that give the animal its other names, the wolftrap or beartrap starfish. The structures are called pedicellariae [PED-uh-suh-LAIR-ee-aye], which are also common in echinoderms. Most echinoderms seem to use them to keep algae and other organisms from settling on the body, although scientists aren’t completely sure. Pedicellariae have muscles and sensory receptors, and when something touches them, they snap shut like a trap. In the case of the Antarctic death star, its pedicellariae are extra big and really sharp. When a krill or other tiny animal brushes against one of these little traps, it grabs the animal and then the death star can eat it.

But that’s just part of what’s going on when the death star goes hunting, so let’s discuss it in more detail.

Most starfish spend almost all their time on the ocean floor, walking around looking for food. The death star does this too, but not all the time. Quite often a death star will climb on top of a rock or other large structure, and then it will extend some of its rays up and out into the water. It waves its rays around and if it touches a small animal, it will wrap the rays around it. The pedicellariae also snap shut. Then the death star can eat whatever it caught. Usually this is krill or amphipods, but it’s not a picky eater. Since it will eat animals it finds already dead, researchers aren’t completely sure if the death star ever catches fish. They’ve certainly found dead fish in death star stomachs, but the water it lives in is so cold that not many fish live there anyway. Fish don’t make up a big part of the death star’s diet, whether or not it’s catching them itself. The death star also eats other starfish, including smaller death stars.

Like other starfish, the death star can eat surprisingly large pieces of food because it can evert its stomach. This means it can actually push its stomach out through its mouth and engulf whatever large food it’s found or caught. The digestion process starts right away, which allows the starfish to eat food that can’t actually fit through its mouth. It doesn’t chew its food because it doesn’t have any kind of teeth or jaws, but who needs teeth and jaws if your stomach can just reach out and grab food?

While I was researching the death star, I came across a study published in November 2023 about echinoderms, so let’s learn something surprising about starfish and their relations in general.

Echinoderms demonstrate radial symmetry instead of bilateral symmetry. That’s why you can’t tell when a starfish or other echinoderm is facing forward, because it doesn’t actually have a forward. But it’s actually more complicated than it sounds, because the distant ancestor of echinoderms, which lived during the Cambrian almost half a billion years ago, did demonstrate bilateral symmetry, and the larvae of modern echinoderms do too. When a modern echinoderm larva develops into an adult, the left side of its body is the only part that grows. The right side of its body is absorbed and from then on the body develops radially. It actually shows pentaradial symmetry, with five sections around the central part of the body. That’s why so many starfish have five rays, although obviously not all of them. The death star starts out with five rays but adds more and more as it grows.

For a long time scientists have wondered if echinoderms technically have heads or if they’re just bodies. They don’t have eyes or nostrils or most other body parts that we associate with the head, just an oral opening in the middle of the underside of the disc. Starfish do have cells at the ends of their rays that act as eyespots, which are sensitive to light and dark but can’t actually see anything else. Instead of a brain, it has a nerve ring around its mouth and connected nerve nets in its rays, and its digestive system extends into its rays.

In other words, it sure seems like an echinoderm has no head and is basically just a weird body. But the new study came to a surprising conclusion. The study examined starfish genetics and discovered that the genes associated with head development were there. It was the genes associated with the development of a body and tail that were missing. In other words, the starfish, and echinoderms in general, are just really complicated heads.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 358: The Bush Dog and the Maned Wolf

Thanks to Dean, Mia, and Lydia for their suggestions this week!

The tayra looks kind of like a canid but is a mustelid [photo by Bob Johnson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85291909]:

The bush dog looks kind of like a mustelid but is a canid:

The maned wolf looks like a fox with reallllllly long legs:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we have a suggestion from Dean, who wanted to learn about the bush dog. We’re actually going to learn about two animals that share the name bush dog, along with an animal suggested by both Mia and Lydia, the maned wolf.

We’ll start with the bush dog that isn’t a dog. It’s more commonly called the tayra and it’s native to much of Central and South America. It prefers to live in forests, especially tropical forests, but it will travel long distances to find food and can sometimes be found in grasslands and other areas. Despite the name bush dog, it’s not a canid at all. It’s a member of the family Mustelidae, which includes weasels, ferrets, and wolverines. The tayra has a long body and short legs, but it’s also bulkier than most mustelids, more similar to a wolverine. It can grow almost four feet long, or 1.2 meters, including its long tail, and its fur is short and black or dark brown. It also has a patch of lighter fur on its chest that’s a unique shape to every individual, sometimes called a heart patch.

The tayra is mostly active during the day and does a lot of climbing around in trees, where it eats birds, lizards and other reptiles, small mammals, eggs, fruit, honey, and large insects and other invertebrates. It especially likes plantains, which is a type of banana. The tayra will pick green plantains and hide them, then come back to eat them after they ripen. It’s also really good at catching spiny rats, so good that the indigenous peoples in various places would sometimes tame a tayra or two in order to keep spiny rats and other rodents away from their food stores.

The bush dog that is actually a canid is also from South America, but we’re going to start not with the living animal, but with an extinct one. Back in the 19th century, when it was possible to specialize in several fields of science at once, a Danish man named Peter Wilhelm Lund made a name for himself as an archaeologist, a paleontologist, and a zoologist. He moved to Brazil in South America in 1825, went back to Europe in 1829 to finish his doctoral degree, but returned to Brazil in 1832 for the rest of his life. He just really liked it there. He described hundreds of Brazilian plants and animals scientifically and is most well known for his studies of extinct ice age megafauna, along with prehistoric cave paintings.

One of the animals he described was an unusual canid. He discovered its skull in a cave in 1839, so he called it the cave wolf. That makes it sound scary and impressive, but it was actually a fairly small animal. He gave it the scientific name Speothos pacivorus, which means “cave wolf hunter.”

In 1842 Lund described a living canid with a similar skull, although its teeth weren’t as big and it was even smaller than the cave wolf. But he didn’t quite make the connection and placed the living animal in a completely different genus. In 1843 another scientist renamed the animal but again placed it in a completely different genus from the cave wolf.

It’s not unusual for an animal to be studied repeatedly and its taxonomy debated by various scientists as they try to figure out what the animal’s closest relations are. But in the case of the bush dog, it kept getting shuffled from genus to genus every few years, so that in the 180 years since it was originally described it’s been placed and re-placed in nine different genera, until it was finally renamed Speothos venaticus and recognized as a close relation, or possibly the direct descendant, of the cave wolf.

Although the bush dog’s ancestors lived in the highlands of Brazil, the bush dog alive today is adapted for forests. It has partially webbed toes that help it walk on soft soil around water, and it spends a lot of time in water. It’s brown all over, although some individuals have a patch of lighter brown fur on the throat, and its legs and tail are often darker. Puppies are black all over. Its legs are short and it has a short snout and small ears. It actually really does look similar in many ways to the other bush dog, the tayra, although its tail is shorter.

The bush dog is incredibly shy and lives in remote areas that are hard for humans to explore, so we actually don’t know a whole lot about it. It’s so shy that it’s even hard to catch on camera traps. It’s a social animal that sometimes hunts by itself and sometimes in groups, and it eats pretty much anything it can catch. Its main prey is rodents, especially large rodents like capybaras, but it also hunts peccaries, tapirs, and the large flightless bird called the rhea.

Part of the reason the bush dog kept getting moved from genus to genus is that it’s not very similar to other canids. The fact that it even looks a lot like a mustelid gives you an idea of how strange it appears. It has a cute puppy face since its snout and ears are so small, and its long chunky body and short legs make it look a little like a corgi. It’s only been recently that scientists have identified one of its closest relations, and it’s a canid you might not expect. It’s also the canid suggested by Mia and Lydia, because everyone loves the maned wolf.

We’ve talked about the maned wolf before, most recently in episode 167. The maned wolf looks kind of like a short-tailed fox with extremely long legs—like, twice as long as a regular fox’s legs or longer. But the maned wolf isn’t a fox and it isn’t a wolf, or a coyote, or a dog, or any other type of canid. It’s its own thing. It lives in the grasslands of central South America, and it needs extremely long legs to help it see over tall grass. It stands over three and a half feet tall at the shoulder, or 110 cm, while the bush dog only stands about one foot tall, or 30 cm.

The maned wolf is mostly solitary, although mated pairs will sometimes share a territory. It’s an omnivore and eats a lot of plant material in addition to hunting small animals that live in the grass. It especially likes a tomato-like fruit called the wolf apple, and it will also eat carrion. If it catches a large animal, or finds a large animal already dead, it will bury what’s left of the body to eat later. It marks the hole it digs with urine so it can more easily find it later. It also marks its territory with urine.

The maned wolf’s urine contains a chemical called pyrazine, which produces a strong smell. Since the smell of pyrazine is produced by many animals and plants that are toxic, it’s possible that having the smell in its urine helps keep other animals away from the maned wolf’s food caches and out of its territory. Humans recognize the smell of pyrazine as something else, marijuana, since the marijuana plant actually contains pyrazine. In 2006 someone at the Rotterdam Zoo in Holland complained that people were smoking marijuana in the zoo, but when police investigated, they discovered that the smell was actually coming from the maned wolf exhibit. This will never not be funny to me.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 357: When Scientists Ate Mammoth Meat

This week we’re going to talk about stories of scientists, explorers, and other modern people eating meat from long-dead extinct animals. Did it ever really happen?

Check out the great new podcast Herbarium of the Bizarre! I highly recommend it even though they don’t eat any mammoth meat.

Further reading:

Was frozen mammoth or giant ground sloth served for dinner at The Explorers Club?

Study Proves the Explorers Club Didn’t Really Eat Mammoth at 1950s New York Dinner

Company Serves World’s First ‘Mammoth’ Meatball, but Nobody Is Allowed to Eat It

Don’t eat me bro:

Blue Babe, a steppe bison mummy found in Alaska:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

We’ve talked about mammoths and other ice age megafauna plenty of times before, but this week we’re going to learn something specific and really weird about these animals, although it’s more accurate to say we’re going to learn how weird humans are.

You may have heard this story before, or something similar to this story. A group of scientists in Siberia or Alaska have unearthed a mammoth carcass that’s been frozen in permafrost for at least 25,000 years. It’s in such good shape that the meat looks as fresh as a fancy restaurant steak that’s ready to go on the grill. At the end of a long day of using pickaxes to dig the mammoth out of ground frozen as solid as rock, the scientists are so hungry that when someone suggests they actually grill some mammoth meat, they all think it’s a good idea. The meat turns out to taste as good as it looks. Everyone has a big steak dinner, even the camp dogs, and when the expedition ends they not only have a mammoth to put on display in their museum, they have a great story to tell about a meal no human has eaten for thousands of years.

You may even have come across an event that inspired this particular story. The incredibly well preserved 44,000 year old Berezovsky mammoth was discovered in Russia in 1900 and excavated in 1901, and it’s now on display in the Zoological Museum in Saint Petersburg. Rumors persisted for years that the expedition members ate some of the mammoth meat, but while we don’t know exactly what happened, definitely no one actually sat down to have a yummy meal of mammoth steak.

It turns out that the meat did look appetizing when thawed, but stank like old roadkill. The expedition erected a big tent over the dig site as they excavated the carcass, which was a slow process in 1901, and the smell became so bad that the expedition members had to take frequent breaks and leave the tent for fresh air.

Apparently the scientists got drunk one night and dared each other to try a bite of the meat, but even after they practically covered it in pepper to disguise the taste, no one could force any down. One man might have managed to eat a single bite, but reports vary. They fed the meat to the camp dogs instead, who were just fine. Dogs and wolves have short, fast digestive tracts and can tolerate eating foods that would make humans very sick.

But that’s not the only story of modern humans eating meat from frozen mammoth carcasses. It supposedly happened on January 13, 1951 at the Roosevelt Hotel’s grand ballroom in New York City. A group called the Explorers Club met for their annual fancy dinner that evening, and as always, the menu contained lots of exotic foods. The main course has gone down in history as being slices of mammoth meat from a 250,000-year-old carcass found in Alaska.

That’s where things get confusing, though, because supposedly the main course was megatherium meat found in Alaska. Megatherium was a giant ground sloth that hasn’t ever been found frozen in permafrost at all, certainly not in Alaska. It lived in South America. However, the Christian Science Monitor magazine thought megatherium was another word for mammoth and reported that the group was served mammoth meat.

Some of the Explorers Club members genuinely thought they were dining on megatherium. Some may have thought it was mammoth. The club’s press release just said “prehistoric meat,” which doesn’t sound very appetizing.

An Explorers Club member who couldn’t attend the dinner asked that his portion be saved for him in a bottle of formaldehyde that he provided. This was done, and the promoter himself, Wendell Phillips Dodge, better known as Mae West’s one-time film agent, filled out the supplied specimen card as “megatherium meat.” The club member put his bottled meat on display at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he worked.

There the bottle stayed until 2001, when it ended up at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. In 2014, a couple of Yale students ran DNA tests on the meat.

As you may have already guessed, the meat wasn’t from a mammoth or a giant ground sloth. It’s meat from the decidedly not extinct green sea turtle, although the green sea turtle is endangered and protected these days, so don’t eat it. Since green sea turtle soup was also served at the meal, it’s probable that the leftover turtle meat was called megatherium meat as a sort of joke. Dodge even published a statement after the dinner that he’d discovered how to turn green sea turtle into giant sloth meat. But by then the story of mammoth meat being served at the dinner had already passed into history.

But while we don’t know if anyone in modern times has eaten frozen mammoth meat, we do know for certain that a group of scientists did eat the meat of a mummified steppe bison that died around 36,000 years ago.

The bison was discovered in 1979 in Alaska and was nicknamed Blue Babe, both from the folktales of the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyon and his pet, Babe the Blue Ox, and because the mummy was coated in crystals of vivianite, which turns blue when exposed to oxygen. Eventually Blue Babe was taxidermied and put on display in the University of Alaska Museum at Fairbanks.

At some point, the team in charge of the specimen decided to try some of its meat in a stew, which from all accounts turned out okay and didn’t make anyone sick. The scientists examined the meat carefully before deciding to cook and eat it, and decided that it was basically freezer-burned but not actually rotten.

Dale Guthrie was part of the Blue Babe excavation team. I’ll quote the relevant paragraph from page 29 of her booklet Blue Babe. The Bjorn Kjurten mentioned in the quote is the man who helped preserve the mummy, and he was also the guy who interviewed one of the Russian scientists who tried to eat mammoth meat with pepper.

“To celebrate Eirich’s work and the new Blue Babe, we decided to cook a bison stew. A marvelous bit of luck had brought Bjorn Kjurten to Fairbanks for guest lectures, and we invited other friends who were game enough to try the stew. Spring was underway. With a good burgundy to brave the rather muddy tone of the dish, we toasted the past and present in the long evening twilight, a taste of the Pleistocene with friends who shared and added to it with their talents and imagination. It was a special evening.”

Guthrie reported that the meat wasn’t very good, but that anything is edible if you use enough onions.

In March of 2023, a company that produces lab-grown meat for human consumption made a giant meatball grown from mammoth DNA. They displayed it as a way to advertise the possibilities of lab-grown meat, but because this particular meat hasn’t been tested to make sure it’s safe for people to eat, no one was allowed to eat it. But maybe in the future, you’ll be able to order a mammoth steak from your local restaurant. Let me know what it tastes like.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 356: The Volcano Rabbit

Thanks to Eva for suggesting the adorable volcano rabbit this week!

Further watching:

American Pikas Calling Out

The volcano rabbit is not a volcano but it is a very small rabbit:

The volcano rabbit is SO CUTE:

The American pika looks kind of like its rabbit cousin [photo by Justin Johnsen, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91574]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we have a suggestion from Eva, who wanted to learn about volcano rabbits! What are volcano rabbits? Do they shoot lava at their enemies? Let’s find out! (No, they don’t shoot lava. Sorry. That’d be awesome!)

The most important thing to know about the volcano rabbit is how small it is. It’s almost the smallest rabbit known. It typically only grows about 9 inches long, or 23 cm, and that’s when it’s stretched out. Rabbits usually sit more bunched up, which makes it look even smaller. Its ears are small and rounded, its tail is short even for a rabbit, and its legs are short. Its fur is also short and very thick, mostly grayish-tan in color.

The second most important thing to know about the volcano rabbit is how rare and endangered it is. That’s because it only lives in one small part of Mexico, specifically on the upper slopes of four volcanoes. Because people also live in this area, which isn’t far from Mexico City, the rabbits’ natural range is fragmented by human-made obstacles like highways that are dangerous for it to cross, along with habitat destruction from logging, livestock grazing, and the building of new houses. People even hunt the rabbit even though it’s a protected animal. We don’t know for sure how many of the volcano rabbits are left in the wild, but the best estimate is around 1,200 rabbits in small populations that are often widely separated. It’s even been declared extinct on another volcano where it used to live, although there may be a small population still hanging on.

The volcano rabbit prefers open woodland in higher elevations where there’s plenty of tall, dense grass native to the area. It makes rabbit-sized tunnels through the grass so it can move around undetected by predators. It also mostly eats this grass. It’s most active at dawn and dusk, which also helps it hide from predators.

When a volcano rabbit does feel threatened, it doesn’t thump its feet to alert other rabbits of danger. Instead, it gives a little alarm squeal. This is really unusual in a rabbit, but it’s something the pika does, and the pika is closely related to rabbits. The pika lives in parts of central Asia and western North America, especially in cold areas like mountaintops. It’s so well adapted to the cold that it can die if the temperature climbs over about 78 degrees Fahrenheit, or 25 Celsius.

The American pika actually looks a lot like the volcano rabbit in some ways, although it’s less rabbit-like in shape and more rodent-like, although it’s not a rodent. It’s a lagomorph. It’s about the same size or a little smaller than the volcano rabbit, with short legs and dense grayish-brown fur that grows longer in winter. It especially likes places with a lot of rocks, since it makes its home in little cracks and crevices between rocks. It prepares for winter by harvesting the plants it eats and storing them in little haypiles. Since it doesn’t hibernate, it needs plenty of food for times when snow and ice make it hard to find plants.

The pika is intensely territorial, because it doesn’t want any other pikas sneaking around eating up its hay, but it does communicate with other pikas. During breeding season the males will make a singing call to attract a female, and all pikas will call to warn others of a predator nearby. I couldn’t find any recordings of a volcano rabbit, but this is what an American pika sounds like:

(wait for it…)

[pika beeping]

Like other rabbits, the volcano rabbit eats grass and other plant parts. The problem is that most of the plants in its habitat are not very high in protein. The more fragmented its habitat is, the harder it is for the rabbits to find enough food to survive, much less to also reproduce. Every time someone decides to let cattle or other livestock graze on the local plants, the rabbits have that much less food.

Fortunately, conservationists in Mexico are working on educating people so they know this cute little rabbit is a protected species. Captive breeding programs are underway too, and parts of the volcanoes where the rabbit lives are within the bounds of a national park. There are plans to create safe corridors to link the rabbit’s fragmented habitats so it can come and go without getting squished by cars, and to restore its range with more native plants so it has plenty of food.

You might worry that the volcano rabbit, besides having all these issues with habitat loss and habitat fragmentation, is also in danger of its volcano home erupting. The volcanoes where it lives are active, but only one of the four poses any danger, and that volcano has erupted repeatedly in the last several hundred years without affecting the volcano rabbit. It actually even had a small eruption in May 2023. Schools in the area were closed for a few days, but no one was hurt, not even a rabbit.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 355: Tiny Owls

This week we learn about two tiny owls! Thanks to Elizabeth and Alexandra for their suggestions!

Further reading:

Burrowing Owl

Elf Owl

The burrowing owl is tiny but fierce [photo by Christopher Lindsey, taken from page linked above]:

The elf owl is also tiny but fierce [photo by Matthew Grube, taken from page linked above]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to learn about two tiny owls. Thanks to Elizabeth and Alexandra for their owl suggestions!

The burrowing owl is native to the Americas, especially the western part of North America, and most of Central and South America. It prefers grasslands and other open areas. It’s a small owl, not much bigger than the average songbird. It’s mostly brown with lighter underparts that are barred with a brown pattern.

You can tell a lot about an owl by the color of its eyes. In general, an owl with dark eyes is most active at night, an owl with orange or red eyes is likely to be most active at dawn and dusk, and an owl with yellow eyes is often active in the day. That’s not a hard and fast rule, but it can help you make a good guess about an owl’s behavior. The burrowing owl has yellow eyes, and it is indeed active in the day. The term for daytime activity is diurnal.

In past episodes I’ve said that owls have long legs that are usually hidden by feathers. In the case of the burrowing owl, its long legs are in plain sight because it spends a lot of the time running around on the ground. It will sometimes chase prey on foot, but other times it will perch on a fence post, tree branch, or some other high place to watch for a small animal to pass by. Then it will swoop down to grab it just like any other owl. It eats mice and other small rodents, lizards, small snakes, frogs, large insects and other invertebrates like scorpions and caterpillars, and birds. It especially likes termites and grasshoppers. Females are more likely to hunt during the daytime, while males are more likely to hunt at night or at dawn and dusk. Sometimes the burrowing owl will eat fruit and seeds too. When the burrowing owl has more food than it can eat, it will store some in underground larders.

The burrowing owl gets its name because it builds a nest in a burrow in the ground, often in burrows dug by other animals like prairie dogs and skunks. Some subspecies of burrowing owl will dig its own burrow, and all subspecies will enlarge an existing burrow until it’s happy with the size. It uses its beak to dig and kicks the dirt out with its feet. Both the male and female will work on the burrow together. Once it’s the right size and shape, the owl will bring in dried grass and other materials to line the burrow. One of its favorite materials is dried animal dung, especially from cattle. The dung releases moisture inside the burrow, making it more comfortable, and attracts insects that the owls eat. Win-win! It will also scatter animal dung around the entrance of its burrow and will sometimes also collect trash like bottle caps and pieces of foil to decorate the entrance.

The female lays her eggs in the burrow and spends most of her time incubating the eggs, only going outside briefly to stretch her legs. The male stands guard at the entrance to the burrow or nearby except when he’s out hunting. He brings food back for the female.

When the eggs hatch, both parents take care of the babies. At first the chicks stay in the burrow, but as they grow older they come out to play outside and start learning how to fly. Since burrowing owls usually nest in small colonies, there’s always an adult watching for danger somewhere nearby.

Most birds abandon their nests after their chicks are grown. The burrowing owl often uses its burrow year-round, although populations that migrate will usually make a new burrow when they return to their summer range. The burrow gives the owls a place to nap during the hottest part of the day, and it’s also a good place to hide if a predator approaches. Rattlesnakes also use burrows for the same purposes, and when a burrowing owl runs from a predator and hides in its burrow, it will mimic the rattling and hissing of an angry rattlesnake. A lot of times that’s enough to make a predator think twice about digging up the burrow.

This is what a burrowing owl sounds like when it’s not imitating an angry rattlesnake:

[burrowing owl call]

The burrowing owl is increasingly threatened by habitat loss and introduced predators likes cats and dogs. Luckily it’s an adaptive bird and is happy to use artificial burrows in protected areas. It’s a useful bird to have around since it eats a lot of insects, prairie dogs, and other animals that are considered pests by humans. Plus it’s an incredibly cute bird. I mean, it’s a tiny owl with long legs! How could you not find that cute?

Small as it is, the burrowing owl isn’t the smallest owl known. The elf owl is even smaller, about the size of a sparrow. It’s only about 5 inches tall, or 13 cm, with a wingspan of only 9 inches, or 22 cm. It lives in parts of the southwestern United States during the summer and parts of Mexico during the winter.

The elf owl is nocturnal like most other owls, and this is where our guideline of owl eye color breaks down, because the elf owl has yellow eyes. Its feathers are mostly gray or grayish-brown with white streaks. When it’s sitting on a twig, it kind of looks like a dead leaf or a broken-off branch.

It mostly eats insects, but it also likes scorpions, spiders, and centipedes. Occasionally it eats small reptiles or mammals. When it catches a scorpion, it removes the stinger before eating the scorpion, but it doesn’t seem to be hurt by actually being stung. It’s a fast, acrobatic flyer and catches insects on the wing, but it also hunts for insects on the ground and has long legs like the burrowing owl.

The elf owl nests in holes made by woodpeckers in trees or cacti, and the male brings the female food while she keeps the eggs warm. After the babies hatch, the male brings them food too and also continues to feed the female for another couple of weeks, until she starts to hunt again. The male will also catch a tiny snake called the western threadsnake, which looks a lot like an earthworm and only grows a foot long at most, or 30 cm, and is usually much smaller than that. It lives underground most of the time and while it has eyes, they don’t work except to sense light and dark. It eats insects, especially termites and ants. When an elf owl catches one of these little snakes, it doesn’t eat it. Instead, it brings the snake back to the nest and lets it go. The snake eats all the insects it can find, including parasites that might hurt the baby owls. Then again, sometimes the nest is inhabited by tree ants that do the same thing, cleaning up all the parasites and scraps of leftover food while not bothering the owls.

If a predator grabs an elf owl, or a scientist nets and handles one, the owl pretends to be dead. A lot of times this will cause the predator to relax its jaw muscles, which often allows the owl to wiggle free and fly away. The scientists are a little more careful about relaxing their hands, but when a scientist handles an elf owl, it’s usually to do a quick examination and maybe put a leg band on for identification purposes, and then they let the owl go again anyway.

This is what an elf owl sounds like:

[elf owl call]

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 354: Sheep and Sivatherium

Thanks to Hannah, who suggested sheep as this week’s topic! We’ll also learn about a few other hoofed animals, including the weird giraffe relative, sivatherium.

Further reading:

The American Jacob Sheep Breeders’ Association

What happened with that Sumerian ‘sivathere’ figurine after Colbert’s paper of 1936? Well, a lot.

A Jacob sheep ewe with four horns (pic from JSBA site linked above):

The male four-horned antelope [photo by K. Sharma at this site]:

A modern reconstruction of sivatherium that looks a lot like a giraffe [By Hiuppo – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2872962]:

The rein ring in question (on the left) that might be a siveratherium but might just be a deer:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to look at an animal suggested by Hannah a long time ago. Hannah suggested we talk about sheep, and I can’t even tell you how many times I almost did this episode but decided to push it back just a little longer. Finally, though, we have the sheep episode we’ve all been waiting for! We’re also going to learn about a strange animal called sivatherium and a mystery surrounding when it went extinct.

The sheep has cloven hooves and is a ruminant related to goats and cattle. It mostly eats grass, and it chews its cud to further break down the plants it eats. It’s one of the oldest domesticated animals in the world, with some experts estimating that it was first domesticated over 13,000 years ago. Mammoths still roamed the earth then. Sheep are especially useful to humans because not only can you eat them, they produce wool.

Wool has incredible insulating properties, as you’ll know if you’ve ever worn a wool sweater in the snow. Even if it gets wet, you stay nice and warm. Even better, you don’t have to kill the sheep to get the wool. The sheep just gets a haircut every year to cut its wool short. Wild sheep don’t grow a lot of wool, though. They mostly have hair like goats. Humans didn’t start selecting for domestic sheep that produced wool until around 8,000 years ago.

Like other animals that were domesticated a very long time ago, including dogs and horses, we’re not sure what the direct ancestor of the domestic sheep is. It seems to be most closely related to the mouflon, which is native to parts of the middle east. The mouflon is reddish-brown with darker and lighter markings and it looks a lot like a goat. Other species of wild sheep live in various parts of the world but aren’t as closely related to the domestic sheep. The bighorn and Dall sheep of western North America are closely related to the snow sheep of eastern Asia and Siberia. The ancestors of all three species spread from eastern Asia into North America during the Pleistocene when sea levels were low and Asia and North America were connected by the land bridge Beringia.

The male sheep is called a ram and grows horns that curl in a spiral pattern, while the female sheep is called a ewe. Some ewes have small horns, some don’t. This is the case for both wild and domestic sheep. Sheep use their horns as defensive weapons, butting potential predators who get too close, and they also butt each other. Rams in particular fight each other to establish dominance, although ewes do too.

But some breeds of domestic sheep are what is called polycerate, which means multi-horned. That means a sheep may have more than two horns, typically up to six. Many years ago I kept a few Jacob sheep, which are a polycerate breed, and in a Patreon episode from 2018 I went into really too much detail about this particular breed of sheep. I will cut that short here.

The Jacob is a hardy, small sheep with tough hooves, and it’s white with black spots. Ideally, a Jacob sheep will have four or six well-balanced horns. In a six-horned sheep, the upper pair branch upward, the middle pair curl like an ordinary ram’s horns, and the lower pair branch downwards. Sometimes a sheep will have three or five horns, or will start out with four horns but as they grow, two will merge so it looks like they have a single horn on one side. Sometimes a ram’s horns will grow so large that the blood supply is choked off for the lower pair, which will die and stop growing. Breeding a pair of six-horned Jacob sheep doesn’t guarantee that the babies will have more than two horns, though. It’s still a recessive trait.

Sheep, goats, cattle, and some antelopes are all bovids. Polyceratism appears to be a bovid trait. It’s caused by a mutation where the horn core divides during the animal’s development.

Occasionally, a sheep of non-polycerate breed, or a goat, or even a cow, is born with multiple horns. The blue wildebeest is also occasionally born with multiple horns. Sometimes an animal grows a lot of horns, like eight, but usually it’s three, four, five, or six.

Another animal with more than two horns is the four-horned antelope that lives in India and Nepal. Its horns are quite small, just a pair of tiny points on the forehead with a pair of longer points behind them. The antelope itself is also small, not much more than two feet tall at the shoulder, or 60 cm. Its coat is reddish or yellowish-brown with white underparts, and a black stripe down the front of the legs. The longer horns grow up to about five inches long, or 12 cm, but the front horns are no longer than two inches, or five cm.

The four-horned antelope is shy and solitary, and lives in open forests near water. Since it’s so small, it frequently hides in tall grasses. Sometimes a four-horned antelope’s front two horns are just bumps covered with fur, which makes them look like ossicones although they’re still actually horns.

That brings us to the other group of animals with multiple horns, although they’re not actually horns. I mentioned ossicones in the tallest animals episode, about giraffes. They’re made of ossified cartilage instead of bone, and are covered in skin and fur instead of a keratin sheath. Antlers are actually very similar to ossicones in many ways. A deer’s antlers grow from a base that is similar to an ossicone, and as they grow, the antlers are covered with tissue called velvet that later dries and is scraped off by the deer to show off the bony antlers. Unlike horns, which are always unbranched, the ossicones of some extinct animals can look like antlers.

We talked about sivatherium in episode 256, about mammoths. It was an ancestor of modern giraffes that lived in Africa and India around a million years ago. It stood around 7 feet tall at the shoulder, or just over two meters, but had a relatively long neck that made it almost 10 feet tall in total, or about three meters. It had two pairs of ossicones, one pair over its eyes and another between its ears. Like the four-horned antelope, the front pair were smaller than the rear pair, but the rear pair was broad and had a single branch.

Sivatherium was once believed to be closely related to elephants, and reconstructions of it often made it look like a moose with a short trunk. But modern understanding of its anatomy suggests it looked like a heavily built giraffe with shorter legs and neck, sort of like the giraffe’s closest living relative, the okapi.

One interesting thing about Sivatherium is how recently it may have been alive. Some researchers think it may have been around only 8,000 years ago. There’s rock art in India and the Sahara that does seem to show a long-necked animal with horns that isn’t a giraffe. The art has been dated to around 15,000 years ago. But the big controversy is a figurine discovered in 1928.

That’s when a copper rein ring was found in Iraq and dated to about 2800 BCE. A rein ring was part of the harness to a four-wheeled chariot, with two holes to thread the reins through to keep them from tangling. Above the rings was a little decorative figure of an animal. This particular rein ring’s figure shows an animal with short horns above the eyes and branching horn-like structures farther back, between the ears. When it was originally discovered, scientists thought the figure represented a type of fallow deer found in the area, with the ends of the antlers broken off. But one researcher, Edwin Colbert, pointed out that no deer known has four antlers and the figure clearly has two little bumps over its eyes that are separate from the branched antler or horn-like structures farther back. In 1936 he published his conclusion that the animal wasn’t a deer at all but sivatherium, and a lot of scientists agreed.

That would mean sivatherium might have been alive less than 5,000 years ago. Part of the issue is that sivatherium’s branched ossicones weren’t very big in comparison to its head, while the fallow deer’s antlers are proportionally quite large. The figurine has structures that match sivatherium’s ossicones more than a deer’s antlers. But in 1977, two little pieces of copper were found in a storage box where they’d been since the original discovery of the rein ring. The pieces fit exactly onto the ends of the figure’s horns, showing that the horns are much bigger than originally thought.

That doesn’t explain everything, though. The figure still has those extra little horns over its eyes, and while the branched horns look like deer antlers, they still don’t look like fallow deer antlers. Some researchers point out that sivatherium had a lot of variation in the size and shape of its ossicones, too.

Ultimately there’s not enough evidence either way of whether the figurine depicts a deer or sivatherium. If sivatherium did live as recently as a few thousand years ago, hopefully remains of it will be found soon. Until we know for sure, you can still be glad that the giraffe is alive, because it’s just as amazing as its extinct relation.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!